Tuesday, January 08, 2008

As the Page Turns III

The reigning forces of avant-lit who published my new novel 29 Inches: A Long Narrative Poem this past Fall have now posted a new mp3 podcast as part of their Interviews from the Edge series. The program features a long discussion with me about 29 Inches and its thematic resolve to remix a continuous deluge of spam emails into a contemporary love story, albeit one mediated by distancing technologies and the crass commercial developers who hope to commodify all forms of emotional expression. The novel samples from a summer's worth of incoming spam email as part of an ongoing remixology that converts this "language waste" into a renewable energy source that can fuel the book's "On the Road" satire ridiculing America's subprime consumer culture and its ill-advised tendency to turn all of life itself into more canned spam. Sound familiar, holiday shoppers?

Perhaps just as interesting as the interview itself if not more so, is the fact that the dialogue took place live via Skype and was projected as a sound piece in the social networking space designated as an art exhibition inside the SF Camerawork gallery in San Francisco as part of the "There is Always a Machine Between Us" exhibition. I also had a video in the show as part of the upload process curated by the enthusiastic team inside the gallery.

(The Skype format makes for an on-the-fly manipulation of my so-called voice; the "grain" of voice is barely perceptible but the "gram" of writing spontaneously speaks for itself, at times machinic, yet not quite robotic ... maybe veering toward the post-human?)